November 11, 2009

Plan on the Run

Take a look at your Strategic Planning documents. I will wager that the vast majority of them are based on a 5 year period. The 5-year Plan pervades our planning paradigms; it is the antithesis of Planning on the Run.

Bottom line - does the 5th year ever happen? NO! It becomes the 4th year after one year; the 3rd year after the second year of the five year cycle. Well if the latter years never really occur why do we try and plan for them in our strategic development process? The only reason I can think of is that the 5-Year Plan is an accepted way of doing things when it comes to strategic planning. It is by no means DiFFERENT.

In Chapter Nineteen of my book, I talk about a new Strategic Planning Process that better meets the needs of organizations confronted by a constantly changing world. The BE DiFFERENT Practice establishes a planning process that is execution centric. It establishes months as the planning unit rather than years. It compresses the planning time horizon to 36 months or less in order to keep execution as the activity driver of the organization.

In addition, the BE DiFFERENT Planning Process recognizes that there are random unpredictable forces that impact the results as we move along the execution path. We need to learn from how well the plan execution is going and make adjustments along the way.

The steps in the process (to you computer pros, yes it is an endless ‘do loop’) include:
- Plan
- EXECUTE
- Learn
- Adjust
- Go to EXECUTE

The result of this process is of course that your Strategic Plan document suddenly becomes an organic entity. It changes as you learn through execution. It is morphed from a Statement of Strategic Direction to what I call a Repository of Learning. It is a messy document. It is written on. It had coffee stains on the pages of which many are earmarked for specific reference. And, it may possess the odd blood stain from an unwanted paper cut! It is used…... unlike many Planning documents that I have seen which look like their original pristine ironed form (perched ever so elegantly on a book shelf where one can hand gesture its presence but never violates its binding).

I know some planning community will take issue with my methods. After all I suppose it is somewhat gratifying to believe that pristine appearance and longevity of a Plan somehow defines its worth. What a crock! At best this view gives the organization a false sense of security; at worst it cultivates Momentum Management and the belief that the world doesn’t change and your original work will stand the test of time.

Don’t go there. BE DiFFERENT. Plan on the Run.

Cheers, Roy Osing
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Posted 11.11.09 at 06:36 am by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 8, 2009

BE DiFFERENT or be dead: Customer Service or Serving Customers?

Most businesses that I know talk about ‘customer service’ as being a critical plank in their market strategy. I have always had difficulty with this expression from a BE DiFFERENT perspective because it perpetuates the notion that the organization decides what to supply its customers which is influenced by internal considerations such as operating costs, employee capabilities, Union contract agreements and operating procedures. In other words customer service becomes the outcome or product of a number of internal company constraints and is wrapped up by the smiling faces and voices of its people. A classic example is the fact that most organizations are unable to provide specific appointment times when it comes to installing and repairing their service. They simply can’t commit to being at your house at 3pm (or even promising to be there in the afternoon) to do the work you require.

In the Customer Service world, the company is in the control position.
In the BE DiFFERENT world of serving customers the customer drives the company. It’s a world where ‘How can I help?’ is the common theme that drives all business activity not ‘Here’s what we provide.’ Serving customers literally defines everyone in your organization (it applies to not-for-profits as well as they also have customers) as a servant whose role is to respond to the moment-by-moment changing needs and expectations of people who touch your business.

Serving customers requires a different operating model for companies. Rather than the operating procedures dictating what service looks like, operations is created in the image of the flexibility required to serve customers day-in and day-out.

Serving customers demands a customer obsessed culture where leaders coach and serve rather than command and control. Frontline people have a tough job in a servant role and they need their leaders to be supporting them not telling them what to do.

Serving customers means that we need to start hiring people that like humans. To be able to flex to the often volatile behaviour of customers starts with an innate love for people. You can’t train people to love people. You need to go out and find them, bring them in to your organization and allow them to infect their fellow employees.

Serving customers creates rules, procedures and policies from the customer’s perspective, enabling frontliners to ‘say yes’ to what customers want rather than enforcing internal rules and having to ‘say no’.

BE DiFFERENT and start the journey to serve customers. There is much more to come on this. Questions? Ask Roy on my home page.
Cheers, Roy Osing

Remember to follow me on Twitter

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Posted 11.8.09 at 08:14 am by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 5, 2009

Dazzle your Customers - The Four Step BE DiFFERENT Process

Chapter Forty of my book provides four practical practices for dazzling your customers. Dazzle = loyal customers so listen up!

Serving customers has two components: Core Service and the Service Experience. Core Service is the basic thing you provide the market; your dial tone so to speak. Without your Core Cervice you don’t have a business. Clean hotel rooms, dial tone, accurate financial advice, working stereo systems and 24X7 cable service are all examples of Core Cervice.

Interestingly, customers expect your Core Service to work every time, and when it does they give you a ‘C’ on your report card. Customer loyalty though is unnaffected. The source of customer loyalty is the Service Experience; dazzling a customer will get you an ‘A’ on your report card and they will keep coming back.

How does an organization create a dazzling experience? The BE DiFFERENT principle to dazzle is called Vary the Treatment and is based on the formula:

Variable service experiences = constant levels of satisfaction = increasing customer loyalty

The principle at play is that every individual coming in contact with your organization has different expectations; no two people are alike. It follows that in order to achieve consistently high levels of service satisfaction you need to be able to flex to what each person demands of you at any point in time; i.e. your organization must be designed to provide variable service experiences for your customers.  Here are four practices to Vary the Treatment.

Hire human being lovers. Can you dazzle if your frontliners have a fundamental dislike for humans? No. Creating memorable experiences for customers requires employees who want to serve; they want to take care of people. Look at your recruitment programs. Do they explicitly look for this attribute?

Recover: fix it and do the unexpected. Service mistakes happen in any organization; what’s critical, however, is what you do when they occur. The amazing thing is that customers are more loyal after a successful service recovery than if the mistake never happened at all! How to recover? Fix the mistake FAST and then blow them away with the surprise factor.

Kill ‘dumb rules’. Do you have policies that don’t make sense to customers? You know the things you try and enforce that create de-dazzling experiences? Seek them out - ask your frontline - modify or get rid of them so they are not a source of aggravation. Policy creation should be driven from the customer’s perspective not internal staff groups who are in the control mode.

Bend the rules; empower the frontline to ‘say yes’. You can’t dazzle customers if your frontline is in the rule enforcement mode all the time. Imposing your rules, policies and procedures will annoy some of them so allow your frontline to bend them when they need to.

Questions? Ask Roy on my home page. Cheers, Roy Osing
Remember to follow me on Twitter

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Posted 11.5.09 at 09:06 am by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 2, 2009

Storytelling - a BE DiFFERENT Strategic issue for your Service Strategy

How do you make you strategy for serving customers come alive? Many companies use storytelling to ‘breathe life’ into their vision of service and are effective in getting the message across.

Ask an employee in your organization to tell a story about how a customer was dazzled when they were served by someone in your organization. If they can’t (and for most it is a challenging question) then you either haven’t defined your Service Strategy in enough detail to clearly understand what is to be expected by employees in delivering it, or there is not enough action around your strategy to be able to observe it and tell a story about it.

You clearly need to remove the barriers to storytelling but you also need to treat telling stories as a fundamental responsibility of your leadership team. If your leaders can’t describe in vivid terms what is expected of people in serving customers employee won’t get it. Or they will each have their own definition of what the strategy is and will deliver it accordingly with the resulting mosaic of service experiences being delivered to customers with little consistency with respect to the intended strategy.

Get Storytelling on the performance plan of your managers and hold them accountable for doing it. Develop and implement a Storytelling Development Program to first, remind people what your Service Strategy is; second, what it looks like when it is being pristinely executed (i.e. what behaviors do you expect to see from your employees who are in customer serving roles?) and third, what storytelling objectives each manager is expected to achieve in their annual performance plan. Remind your management team that compensation will have a storytelling component and make it matter!

Finally, provide the opportunity for managers to practice storytelling. This is about effective communication around a critical part of your overall business strategy so it’s important. It’s about painting a picture for people to see what is expected of them and what the desired outcome is. It’s about providing a way for your leaders to be able their fundamental leadership role. It’s NOT a silly juvenile exercise!

Who are the Storytelling champions in your organization? Who do it well? Find them and ask them to help put together and run your Storytelling Development Program. Use them to show others how it is done. Recognize them for the type of behavior expected. Reward them as an example to others.

Once you have Storytelling established as a strategic tool to reinforce your Service Strategy you can use stories as part of your overall advertising and promotion strategy.

Cheers, Roy Osing

Remember to follow me on Twitter

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Posted 11.2.09 at 12:31 pm by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)